Increasing Sprint Review Attendance with Branded Cupcakes!

Sibby’s Cupcakery started in 2004 out of Sibby Thomsen’s home in Palo Alto. In 2005, the cupcakery moved to San Mateo and expanded into the current commercial space just south of downtown San Mateo. Sibby’s passion is in the artistry of developing custom shapes and decorations which is the underlying reason for the lack of a retail storefront.

Focusing on bulk custom orders allows her to avoid mass-production of stock flavors and instead design perfect compliments for events ranging from children’s birthdays to bachelorette parties and even the occasional breast augmentation party (who has a breast augmentation party?). One event she catered resulted in cupcakes modeled after fast food items (hamburgers, french fries, milkshakes, etc).

While she has considered expanding her offerings of sweet delicacies with savory varieties, the demands of coming up with new designs and new flavors have not allowed this to come to fruition. Every month they have a featured flavor that they offer in addition to their standards. In March, the flavor was Banana Cream Pie, for April it is Very Strawberry. The strawberries for the Very Strawberry are organically grown and sourced from local farmers markets. Other ingredients are carefully selected and many result from detailed blind taste tests.

As practitioners of Scrum with two week iterations, we hold sprint reviews every other Friday. Serving interesting and tasty snacks at our sprint reviews is important to us for two reasons. First, snacks have an uncanny ability to coax wide attendance. Second, the treats are a nice, and much appreciated, reward for those who will be presenting the fruits of their labor.

Recently we launched a new product, Genius Enterprise, that includes an extensive and comprehensive suite of marketing automation functionality. For the final sprint review before release, I knew we had to up the ante on what snacks were provided.

Bill Basking in the Sugary Glow of Sibby's Cupcakery

Several months ago, during a lunch trip to Charlie’s Taqueria in San Mateo (lauded in a previous post by Drew Stephens), we discovered a bulk order cupcakery called Sibby’s Cupcakery. Sibby’s has no storefront and does not sell individual cupcakes. What Sibby’s does do is make not just truly delicious cupcakes, but also customize the frosting design for NO EXTRA CHARGE. Cupcakes are $39 a dozen (a price that has remained constant for four years, even though all ingredients are significantly more expensive) and can be customized according to the design of your choosing.

The customization is what resonated most with me. Thanks to the marketing brilliance of our CEO and marketing department, Genius.com has a strong brand and, as can be seen by this blog, we all have a perhaps unhealthy appreciation of orange and green. While sometimes confused with the logo representing the kind folks at the Apple Genius bar (though they have an extra electron), our atomic logo was a natural choice for inclusion in the cupcake artistry. I gave my business card to the kind folks at Sibby’s for their reference, then headed back to work, not sure what to expect. I figured that we would at least have some delicious treats, even if the customizations didn’t quite match our logo.

What I didn’t expect was the artistic majesty that was delivered promptly at 11:45am on Friday morning. Some had the atomic logo, some had “genius.com” scrolled across the top. The orange and green were perfectly matched to our corporate colors. In all, we had three dozen branded cupcakes that would make any marketer (including ours!) proud.

Vanilla w/ Atomic Logo

Grandma's Chocolate Tea Cake w/ Orange Genius.com Writing

Vanilla w/ Orange Disc and White Genius.com Writing

Needless to say, our sprint review was a rousing success. Most of the company came to see the demo, the product sparkled when our product owner showed the functionality, and everyone raved about the cupcakes.